Doomsday Vault in Arctic Receives Chilli Pepper Seeds
by The "doomsday vault" is built deep inside an arctic mountain and was constructed primarily to protect and conserve our planet’s main foods from possible future disasters such as floods and even nuclear war.
More seeds have been taken to the “doomsday vault” on the Arctic Archipelago of Svalbard.
They are chilli seeds from North America’s hottest food crops.
Seven US senators delivered the latest addition of seeds to the frozen outpost.
The “doomsday vault” is built deep inside a mountain and was constructed primarily to protect and conserve our planet’s main foods from possible future disasters such as floods and nuclear war.
So far the vault boasts seeds of more than half a million of the Earth’s crops. The chilli seeds that arrived are of a number of varieties and have been welcomed with open arms to the storage facility.
Hot Chillies In from the cold
Several varieties of the chilli have been stored and one such seed is the Wenk’s Yellow Hots. This is a pepper that starts out as yellow and very hot before it turns red and loses some of its potency.
The San Juan Tsile is an unpredictable pepper which has a heat sensation ranging from mild, to medium to hot – hence the term of being unpredictable. You take your chances when eating one of those. This type of pepper is cultivated by farmers in a Native American community that is based in New Mexico.
The seeds will be deposited in a “safe box” and stored frozen – just in case there is some form of natural or man-made disaster in the future that wipes out all the world’s crops.
The temperatures in which the seeds are stored are -18C (-0.4F). Two secure rooms hots a variety of seeds from around the world and each room is located approximately 130m 9426ft) deep inside the frozen mountain.
Such a facility has been welcomed by conservationists and scientists around the world who are determined to keep our natural resources and foods intact for future generations – especially with the fear of climate change potentially devastating parts of the globe in decades or centuries to come.
The facility was built at a cost of £5m ($7m US) and took 12 months to complete. The storage building started receiving the first seeds in 2008.
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